Agreement with polite Vi

You have been saying Vi to strangers, older people and colleagues for a long time. At a business meeting it is everywhere — and the moment you leave the present tense, a question appears: if I am talking to ONE woman, why does the past tense look plural? This lesson settles every form that goes with polite Vi.

The main idea: grammar sees a plural

Polite Vi is grammatically the same word as plural vi ("you all"). So everything that agrees with it — the verb, the past participle, the imperative, the possessive — takes the plural form, even when you are speaking to one single person. The only exception is a predicate adjective, which may also agree with the real person in front of you.

Verbs and the past tense

In the present tense you already do this without thinking: Vi radite, Vi imate, Vi ste. The past tense follows the same logic: the helper is ste and the participle ends in -li — Vi ste rekli, Vi ste stigli, Vi ste bili. The participle stays -li whether you are speaking to Mr Kovač or to Mrs Jović.

The classic mistake is to make the participle feminine for a woman: Gospođo Jović, Vi ste bila… Do not. With polite Vi the -l form is always -li: Gospođo Jović, Vi ste bili na sastanku? The same goes for negatives (niste došli) and questions (jeste li poslali).

Adjectives: two correct choices

An adjective after ste — zadovoljan, siguran, spreman, ljubazan — is the one place where the language gives you a choice. The plural (Vi ste ljubazni) is always correct, for anybody, and it is the safe default in writing. But because you are clearly speaking to one person, the adjective may also agree with that person: to a woman, Vi ste ljubazna; Jeste li sigurna? Both are good Serbian; the singular sounds a little warmer and more personal.

Keep the two halves apart: the choice exists only for the adjective. The participle never gets it — Vi ste bili is right for everyone.

Requests and instructions

Asking someone politely to do something uses the plural imperative you already know: sedite, sačekajte, pošaljite, recite mi. A vocative often comes first: Gospodine direktore, izvolite.

Your: Vaš

"Your" for a person you address with Vi is vaš, and it agrees with the noun it describes: Vaš zamenik, Vaša ponuda, Vaše mišljenje.

In letters and e-mails to one person, write the polite forms with a capital letter: Vi, Vas, Vam, Vaš. The capital shows respect; vi in lowercase means "you all". In this lesson the polite forms are always capitalised.